G. W. F. Hegel – Forging Ploughshares

David Bohm and G.W.F. Hegel on the Unity of All in All

There is a stream of theology focused on the unity of all things in Christ, beginning with the New Testament and developed by thinkers such as Origen and Nicholas of Cusa, and then rediscovered by Hegel. Through Hegel and Nicholas, this understanding is taken up in interpreting theoretical physics in the work of David Bohm (1917– 1992). In turn, Bohm’s understanding of a unified wholeness serves to illustrate the radical shift involved in the Creator being incarnate.[1]

Christian identity is, in Hegel’s description, the core of an alternative logic in which “knowing God” is participation in the Infinite. Hegel works this out most carefully in his Logic, but it is thematic in his other works, such as his Philosophy of History. There is a unified and unifying spirit which must be “cognized” so as to overcome the antinomies of Kant.[2] According to Hegel, truth is a unifying essence and energy which is not dependent on antinomies or dualisms. “It is its own material which it commits to its own Active Energy to work up; not needing, as finite action does, the conditions of an external material of given means (such as subject/object duality) from which it may obtain its support and the objects of its activity.”[3]

Reason and God are not separate but “Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process.”[4] Reason is grounded in and sustained by God and therefore “it is its own Substance,” its own “Infinite Power,” “its own Infinite Material underlying all the natural and spiritual life which it originates, as also the Infinite Form — that which sets this Material in motion.”[5] The Infinite Energy of the Universe, or the Infinite mind in which thought participates, is not a mere abstraction but the concrete reality enfolding all things. “It is the infinite complex of things, their entire Essence and Truth.”[6] While finite reason is grounded in the dualisms of subject and object (or God and world), infinite reason passes beyond alienated thinking to a unified knowing of God in “true reason.” Hegel explains this reason, particularly in his Logic, which captured Bohm’s life-long interest.

Throughout his life Bohm was reading and rereading Hegel’s Logic, apparently to such an extent that his wife complained. As reported by Maurice Wilkins, “Mrs. Bohm told me that not long before he died, he was sitting in his armchair at home reading Hegel again, and she said to him, ‘David, don’t you know everything about Hegel by now.’”[7] Specifically, Bohm found in Hegel a way in which to develop his focus on wholeness and his concern to overcome fragmentation.[8]

This choice between wholeness and fragmentation are alternative understandings of all of reality (social, scientific, and religious). Bohm recognizes that to overcome fragmentation, philosophy and religion cannot be treated as discrete realms separate from science. He found physics to have an immediate and necessary overlap, such that “his physical insights became essentially inseparable from the philosophical ones.”[9] Mind and matter in Bohm’s thought (as in Hegel’s) are not separate, but interactive realms, so that to understand the one is an insight into the other. As he explains, “I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete, but which is in an unending process of movement and unfoldment.”[10]

Bohm found this sensibility most fully expressed in Hegel, though he also, at first, associated it with Eastern religion (with which he eventually became disillusioned) but not with religion per se. He may not have appreciated the degree to which Hegel was concerned with recovering Christian orthodoxy and delivering it from the philosophical abstraction into which it had fallen. According to Hegel, “The faith in that would-be philosophical sense is itself nothing but the dry abstractum of immediate knowing, a completely formal determination, not to be confused with or mistaken for the spiritual fullness of the Christian faith, either from the side of the believing heart and the Holy Spirit dwelling within it or from the side of a doctrine abounding in content.”[11] Hegel sets out to displace dry abstraction with an engaged and all-embracing speculative philosophy.

The Hegelian project is not unlike Bohm’s, in that both are seeking to overcome formal distinctions (a separate existence for God and the world or in physics the notion that the world can be divided into distinct parts and discrete causal laws). Both are displacing classical notions of causality (an objective power or force) found in the divided world of Descartes, Kant, and Newton. Ultimate reality, Kant’s “thing-in-itself” was inaccessible, there was a mind/body dualism, and human action and freedom were delimited by the mechanical order. Bohm describes the shift he sought as the displacement of the assumption that “the world can correctly be analyzed into distinct parts each having a separate existence, working together according to exact causal laws to form the whole.” He would replace it with the idea that “the world acts more like a single indivisible unit, in which even the ‘intrinsic’ nature of each part (wave or particle) depends to some degree on its relationship to its surroundings.”[12]

While Hegel is seeking a synthesis of thought in his vision of logos, Bohm’s pursuit is a consequence of the wholeness necessary to account for quantum phenomena. At first he perceives wholeness as an emergent property, but then posits wholeness as fundamental. This “new ‘basic reality’ was no more a manifest reality of discrete objects, and forms – our usual ‘explicate’ or ‘unfolded’ order – but the ‘implicate’ or ‘enfolded’ order that is carried by the ‘holomovement’.”[13] He pictures an unbroken flow from the “implicate” order through the manifest “explicate” (or “unfolded”) order, the whole of which is “holomovement.” He describes it as “the unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders.”[14] Nature is neither unchangeable nor bounded: “there are neither unchangeable ultimate elements nor fixed ultimate laws describing them, i.e. that nature is ontologically and our science epistemically inexhaustible.”[15]

The world is in process, and as reflected in quantum phenomena “becoming” is built into reality. He compares it to a flowing stream of water: “On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow.”[16] Space and time may lend itself to division into abstracted moments, like particular ripples or waves, but the splashes of a particular moment are part of the overall flow.

As Bohm explains, “explicate ‘moments’ that unfold have a certain temporal thickness, a certain duration. Moments are temporal segmentations of unfoldment.”[17] Time is typically broken into past and future with the present as an ungraspable point, but the “unfoldings” of time belong together. “[I]t follows . . . that becoming is not merely a relationship of the present to a past that is gone. Rather, it is a relationship of enfoldments that actually are in the present moment. Becoming is an actuality,” that “continues in all succeeding moments,” that is, “the two principles of the being of becoming and the becoming of being must be woven together.”[18] Time is nested in infinite layers as “any given level is unfolding (in principle creatively) from levels that are more comprehensive and more fundamental.”[19]

According to Michael Younker, “as physics has been further advanced, unexpected and nonintuitive layers beneath the atomic level have been discovered, and the subatomic level contains its own behaviors, and, again yet further, beneath the subatomic level, a layer of fields exists which contains its own distinct behaviors. This illustrates, in a manner, how there could theoretically be many deeper implicate or super-implicate orders.”[20] General laws may apply in particular contexts but this context must be viewed as part of a larger order. This means “laws will take the form of generally valid relationships between the nested sets of projections of its past enfolded in one moment and the corresponding set enfolded in another moment. The special creative quality of each moment cannot, however, be predicted in this way.”[21] Within the infinite implicate order there are always other underlying influences so that any particular moment or event cannot be isolated: “all these projections into any given moment will have the past of the entire universe as their potential content, which is thus enfolded into the moment in question.”[22]

The tendency in science to extract and divide is the tendency of society as a whole, with nations, races and religions pitted against one another. “And in turn, each man is fragmented into different and incompatible loyalties, aims, desires, etc.”[23] There is inevitable despair and helplessness in the face of these overwhelming social forces – “going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.”[24] So too in science Bohm notes, “there are sharp divisions between applied science and pure science, between theory and experiment, between one specialized field and another, and between different branches of each specialty. The gap between science and other aspects of life is just a further example of such fragmentation.”[25]

He sounds very much like Hegel in describing how human thought divides and separates as part of an alienating utilitarian mode. “However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man’s notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives (i.e. to his self-world view), then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments.”[26] Humankind is confronted “with a worldwide breakdown which is self-evident not only at the political level but also in smaller groups and in the consciousness of the individual. The resort to mindless violence is growing and behind it all is the even more mindless threat of mutual annihilation, which is implicit in our current international situation and which could make everything we are doing quite pointless.”[27]

For Bohm, the cure for fragmentation is wholeness. Health and holiness, he notes, both derive from a root meaning wholeness, and this captures the human drive. “All of this indicates that man has sensed always that wholeness or integrity is an absolute necessity to make life worth living. Yet, over the ages, he has generally lived in fragmentation.”[28] To survive the disintegration, a new form of consciousness must be realized in what he calls a “postmodern science.” “A postmodern science should not separate matter and consciousness and should therefore not separate facts, meaning, and value. Science would then be inseparable from a kind of intrinsic morality, and truth and virtue would not be kept apart as they currently are in science.”[29] He calls for an understanding in which seemingly discrete fields or fractured parts are recognized as “enfolded” in a unified whole, claiming “the whole universe is actively enfolded to some degree in each of the parts. Because the whole is enfolded in each part, so are all the other parts, in some way and to some degree.”[30] The power of the imagination is in realizing synthesis as a participation in the essential wholeness of reality. “You see, like I was explaining with Hegel, the idea is first implicit only in itself and then it unfolds, it spreads out, in the imagination or in some other form like writing or painting. It becomes explicit, unfolded.”[31]

The world is not a big machine but is grounded in the energizing power of God (creation is tied to incarnation). The food and nourishment of the world are from within creation, from within history and nature. The alpha and omega is “its own basis of existence, and absolute final aim, it is also the energizing power realizing this aim; developing it not only in the phenomena of the Natural, but also of the Spiritual Universe — the History of the World.” This “’Idea’ or ‘Reason’ is the True, the Eternal, the absolutely powerful essence” that “reveals itself in the World, and . . . in that World nothing else is revealed but this and its honor and glory.”[32] This is the thesis which Hegel and Bohm share and demonstrate. In Christian terms (which Bohm did not embrace but which his work illustrates),God identifies himself with, in, and through, creation so that the eternal is not an entity apart from creation, but is identifiable in creation, in which Christ is being made all in all (I Cor 15:28).

[1] This peculiar Christo-logic is summed up in Maximus’ formula, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.” Maximus, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 7.22.

[2] According to Hegel truth, by definition is a unified understanding realized in thinking God: “God’s being is inseparably bound up with the representation of God in our consciousness.” Science of Logic, 267. Conceptions of God must be immediately related to thinking itself, as this is the “concrete” and unchanging foundation given in faith. There must be a concerted effort to arrive at a consciousness of God, inclusive of self-consciousness and consciousness of the world and others.

[3] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, transl. J. Sibree (Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001) 23.

[4] Philosophy of History, 23.

[5] Philosophy of History, 23-24.

[6] Philosophy of History, 24.

[7] Interviews of David Bohm by Maurice Wilkins, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, American Institute of Physics. Cited in Boris Kožnjak, “Waterfalls, Societies, and Temperaments – Fragmentation and Wholeness in the Lives and Work of David Bohm and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel” (SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 73 (1/2022) p.p. (89–128), 99.

[8] This is the claim of Kožnjak.

[9] Kožnjak, 90.

[10] David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980), p. x.

[11] Goerg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline Part I: Science of Logic, Translated and Edited by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1817]) 113.

[12] David Bohm, Basil Hiley, The Undivided Universe. An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (London: Routledge, 1993) 144. Cited in Kožnjak, 93.

[13] Kožnjak, 95. Bohm credits Nicholas of Cusa for the particulars of his vocabulary. Thus, for example, when asked about the Hegelian flavor of these concepts, Bohm replied that “well, of course, you can say that Nicholas of Cusa talked about something like this with a implicatio, explicatio, and complicatio”. Interview of David Bohm by Maurice Wilkins on 27 February 1987, American Institute of Physics. Available at www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohrlibrary/oral-histories/32977-9 (accessed on 31 July 2022). Cited in Kožnjak, 103.

[14] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 218.

[15] Kožnjak, 123.

[16] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 62.

[17]David Bohm, “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” in Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time: Bohm, Prigogine, and Process Philosophy, ed. David Ray Griffin (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 185. Michael F. Younker, “The Theological Significance of the Relations of Freedom and Time in the Sciences and Humanities: An Evaluation of the Contributions of David Bohm and Pauli Pylkko” (2019). (Dissertations. 1694. https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/dissertations/1694,) 242

[18] “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” 185. Cited in Younker, 242.

[19] “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” 186. Cited in Younker, 243.

[20] Younker, 243.

[21] “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” 191. Cited in Younker, 245.

[22] “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” 191. Cited in Younker, 245.

[23] David Bohm,” Impact of Science on Society,”(https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000003864) 160.

[24] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 3.

[25] David Bohm, “Fragmentation in science and in Society”, The Science Teacher 38 (1971).

[26] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 3.

[27] David Bohm, “Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World” (https://www.davidbohmsociety.org/library/postmodern/),

[28] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 4.

[29] Postmodern Science.

[30] Postmodern Science.

[31] Interview of David Bohm by Maurice Wilkins on 6 March 1987. Cited in Kožnjak, 127.

[32] Philosophy of History, 24.

A Historical-Theological Understanding of the Resurrection: From Wittgenstein and Hegel to Moltmann and Paul

Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. W. F. Hegel, two figures not normally cited together, concur that the resurrection of Christ is the triumph of love, and has little to do with the miraculous. Focus on the miraculous aspect of the resurrection misses how resurrection is to be integrated into the life and identity of the crucified. Wittgenstein confides to his diary his struggle with the resurrection. He understands it is not simply a matter of believing another miracle, but a comprehensive shift in how the world is perceived – an alternative grammar in apprehending the world. “Just as ‘God’ does not pick out an agent or an individual among others, in the way a proper name does, so ‘resurrection’ does not pick out a specific event in chronicled history to set beside other events.”[1] Proof or evidence or even the factuality of the resurrection is not primary for Wittgenstein, but the shift in the global “reading” of facts entailing the founding of the church and living in faith. Belief in the resurrection is entry into an alternative world of understanding.

The Death and Resurrection as God’s Story

For Hegel also, the resurrection is not about the miraculous but is to be read as key to the story of God: “the full presence of both humanity and divinity, the despair that God himself is dead, and the reversal, the putting to death of death and the resurrection into life” is “a reenactment of the divine history.”[2] This history is Trinitarian in that the “abstractness of the Father is given up in the Son. But the negation of this negation is the unity of Father and Son—love, or the Spirit.”[3] In Christ a difference in God is realized, in that the distant abstract God is made concrete (in the world), such that he is immediately accessible (in Spirit and love). Through incarnation and death, human finitude is “transfigured into the highest love” as God is poured out and made available in human interiority. The resurrection and ascension are an extension of the incarnation, as in this “exaltation Christ has appeared for immediate consciousness in the mode of actuality.”[4] Hegel refers to the resurrection as making God available for “envisagement,” which he equates with the defeat of death (the negative) and the “preservation in death itself” of the “highest love.”[5]

In Hegel’s estimate this story of God in the history of the “teaching, life, death, and resurrection” makes the community of love, the church, a possibility. This goes beyond an intellectual foundation: “This is the crucial point on which everything depends, this is the verification, the absolute proof. This is what is to be understood as the witness of the Spirit.”[6] This is the history of the kenotic outpouring of the Holy Spirit in which the sensible presence is transfigured into his real presence through the Spirit.[7] In the “eternal repetition of the life passion and resurrection of Christ in the members of the church,” lies the creation and preservation of the world.[8] The world is incorporated into the story of God.

Jürgen Moltmann, like Hegel, reads the resurrection as the unfolding story of God: “The union of Jesus with God and of God with Jesus was constituted . . . by ‘the resurrection of Jesus’.”[9] The risen Christ is the truth of the historical Jesus and the truth of God, and this is captured in the earliest formulas of the New Testament: “Jesus Christ crucified and risen” (1 Co 15:3–5). His resurrection, joined to his life course, teachings, and death, serves as the foundation of Jesus’ identity as Son of God, Lord, or simply God, and is the cornerstone of his eschatological kingdom. Resurrection means his entire life is the founding of the eschatological kingdom, and there is no divide between the life of Christ and the founding of the Church. Luke-Acts, the Gospels and the history of the Church are to be read as a singular movement of God pouring out his life for the world.

Resurrection: The Interpretive Key to All Things

Along with Hegel and Wittgenstein, Moltmann recognized resurrection is not just a fortuitous miracle or another historical event. The resurrection is the end of history as previously understood: “it is not a question of establishing the life and death of Jesus as a historical fact, and regarding the resurrection, the appearances of Jesus and the Easter faith as inter-changeable interpretations of that fact. That would not do justice to the rise of the Christian faith at all.”[10] The resurrection is the interpretive key to understand the life of Christ through faith. The resurrection “does not speak the ‘language of facts’, but only the language of faith and hope, that is, the ‘language of promise.”[11] In this world the cross is foolishness and a scandal, and by the same token the resurrection cannot be “proven.” The cross and resurrection can only be grasped through faith as an alternative world-view.

In the Wittgensteinian sense, for Moltmann the resurrection is the deep grammar by which the meaning of Christ is to be read into all things. Referencing I Cor. 15:14 (“If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is vain and your faith is vain”) Moltmann notes, “If one calls the cross of Jesus the ‘nuclear fact’ of Christian faith, one must call his resurrection the primal datum of that faith.”[12] In the early Christian community, there was little dispute about the fact of the resurrection. The issue was how to interpret Christ’s death in light of the resurrection in which light record of his life was preserved. “As a merely historical person he would long have been forgotten, because his message had already been contradicted by his death on the cross. As a person at the heart of an eschatological faith and proclamation, on the other hand, he becomes a mystery and a question for every new age.”[13]

A Reinterpretation of God’s Righteousness

The Easter faith arose among those who fled the crucifixion, as God seemed to have abandoned Christ. However, where faith in Jesus was shattered at the cross, the resurrection expands faith to include a reconstitution of (Jewish) hope. No longer is righteousness on the basis of the law or Jewish eschatology. Jesus was a “lawless man,” a “rebel,” “abandoned by God” according to the law, but declared righteous by the resurrection. The Jewish apocalyptic says all should wait for the resurrection of the dead, but Easter faith is trust in Jesus resurrection from the dead.[14] “Between the eschatological Easter faith and the various forms of late-Jewish apocalyptic stood Jesus himself and his cross.”[15] The future and past of Judaism are made new in light of God’s identification with Christ. In the resurrection “God has identified himself, his judgment and his kingdom with the crucified Jesus, [with] his cross and his helplessness.”[16] God and life are found in the midst of death as the future kingdom of life is made possible: “namely reconciliation in the midst of strife, the law of grace in the midst of judgment, and creative love in the midst of legalism.”[17]

This is not faith that God will damn the unrighteous and save the righteous – a resurrection unto judgement. This is a different conception of God and righteousness – a trust in God’s righteousness. In the midst of suffering, evil, and death, God has made things right. “The Christian belief in the resurrection does not proclaim world-historical tendencies or anthropological hopes, but the nucleus of a new righteousness in a world where dead and living cry out for righteousness.”[18]

Reading the cross in light of the law makes of Christ’s death one more propitiating sacrifice, with the expiation or propitiation meeting the requirements of the law but the resurrection is the end of the law of just deserts, as executioner, betrayer, oppressor and oppressed alike are received into righteousness by grace. “God had answered the evil deed of men in crucifying Jesus in a glorious way by raising him from the dead (Acts 2.24).”[19] The resurrection read into the cross means all that have been delivered over to death due to unrighteousness will find life. “Through his suffering and death, the risen Christ brings righteousness and life to the unrighteous and the dying.”[20] His death on the cross makes the meaning of the resurrection evident for the unrighteous: as their representative in death provides new life in resurrection. There is passage from death to life for all who are subject to death.

Defeat of Death, Evil and Sin

His is “resurrection from the dead” and not a revivification, reanimation or temporary raising, as it directly counters death (with all of its connotations of sin and punishment). It is not life after death, as conceived in many religions, presuming the immortality of the soul or the transmigration of souls. There is an annihilation of death; not mere life after death. The harshness of the crucifixion is an exclamation that death is a reality, and there can be no peace between this reality (a life lived in light of death) and the reality of crucifixion and resurrection (death defeated by life). This is not on the order of the raising up of Lazarus who would die again, but Jesus is no longer controlled by death: “Christ being raised from the dead will never die again” (Rom. 6.9). “Resurrection means ‘life from the dead’ (Rom. 9.15), and is itself connected with the annihilation of the power of death.”[21] One sort of history ends – “evil, death, abandonment by God” with resurrection marking the beginning of the new world of the righteousness of God.”[22]

He is “the first fruits of them that are asleep,” “the “pioneer of life,” the “firstborn from the dead.” He is “Jesus Christ”: “Jesus” binds him to his past, and “Christ” binds him to his future.[23]

‘Easter’ was a prelude to, and a real anticipation of, God’s qualitatively new future and the new creation in the midst of the history of the world’s suffering. . . For the Easter hope shines not only forwards into the unknown newness of the history which it opens up, but also backwards over the graveyards of history, and in their midst first on the grave of a crucified man who appeared in that prelude.[24]

Through the resurrection the death of Christ becomes the defeat of death for the living and the dead: “For to this end has Christ died and come alive again, that he might be Lord of both dead and living” (Rom. 14.9). The resurrection does not relativize the cross (as a past event), but makes it the point of salvation, qualifying the crucified as Lord and Christ, filling the cross with the eschatological and saving significance of God defeating death in dying and being raised.

The Resurrection as Providing Theological Coherence

The resurrection is often tacked on to legal theories of atonement (e.g., a sign of sacrifice accepted), rather than integrating the resurrection into the life and death of Christ to form a theological coherence. The historical and the eschatological are separated, with Jesus life and death as one half of Jesus and the risen Christ as the other half.[25] His death, separated from his resurrection is a repudiation of what he said and did, but joined together the reality of the incarnation (God become man) is made complete and coherent: “his cross is understood in the light of his resurrection, his way to the cross in the light of the saving meaning of his cross, his words and miracles in the light of his Easter exaltation to be Lord.”[26]

Jesus is raised, which means not only that this single individual has overcome death but his life is extended to church and cosmos. As Rowan Williams puts it, “The life that lives in Jesus is the active source of all relations in the finite world; so it is natural that, in its human embodiment, it is creative of unrestricted relation in the human world – and indeed beyond, if we take seriously Paul’s meditations in Romans 8 on the dependence of the entire creation on the reconciling process that occurs in the death and resurrection of Jesus.”[27] The resurrection is not tacked on to history but is the transformative moment for history and the cosmos, as the indestructible life of God is activated from within history and the cosmos so as to become “all in all” (Col 3:11).

[1] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980 (henceforth CV), 64. Cited in Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition) 218.

[2] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, trans. By R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodson and J. M. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 53.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Hegel, 131.

[5] Hegel, 131-2.

[6] Hegel, 145.

[7] Hegel, 149. As the editor notes, “For Hegel the resurrection of Jesus from the dead indeed entails an Aufhebung—an annulling of his sensible presence, yet a preservation of his real presence and its transfiguration into the modality of spirit.”

[8] Hegel, 152.

[9] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993) 161.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Moltmann, 173.

[12] Moltmann, 161.

[13] Moltmann, 162.

[14] Moltmann, 172.

[15] Moltmann, 166.

[16] Moltmann,169.

[17] Moltmann, 171.

[18] Moltmann, 177.

[19] Moltmann, 179.

[20] Moltmann, 185.

[21] Moltmann, 170.

[22]Moltmann, 169.

[23] Moltmann, 164.

[24] Moltmann, 163.

[25] Moltmann, 160.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Williams, 38.

The Uses of Language: Julia Kristeva and Kenotic Love

Language is the medium in which we live and move, and what we make of or do with language, is determinative of the reality in which we live. In this post-theological age, it may not occur to us to consider that we have an orientation toward or within language. Psychoanalysis, or the talking cure (as Freud described it) is nearly the last realm in which what we do with words, linguistic exchange (even in dreams), how we linguistically constitute ourselves towards others and ourselves (transference and countertransference), is an object of study.

Psychologists have noted that young children pass through a fundamental depression just prior to acquisition of language. Julia Kristeva describes the passage into language as an abandonment by the mother or the narcissistic paradise in which all needs are met, and entry into the symbolic world of the father. “The child must abandon its mother and be abandoned by her in order to be accepted by the father and begin talking … [L]anguage begins in mourning …”[1] Both death and abandonment and the establishment of the self are implicated in language acquisition.

In the description of G. W. F. Hegel, language brings simultaneous awareness of death and its refusal. As he describes, inasmuch as he is speaking and mortal, man is, the negative being who “is that which he is not and not that which he is.”[2] The “faculty” for language and the “faculty” for death arise together, but of course the peculiar faculty for life, at least in the Christian understanding is interwoven with this “faculty” of death and language. Which is to say, this focus and enquiry into language is first and properly the domain of theology.

As Kristeva describes, the work of the cross is to address us at this most basic and deep psychological level: “The ‘scandal of the cross’, the logos or language of the cross … is embodied, I think not only in the psychic and physical suffering which irrigates our lives … but even more profoundly in the essential alienation that conditions our access to language, in the mourning that accompanies the dawn of psychic life. By the quirks of biology and family life we are all of us melancholy mourners, witnesses to the death that marks our psychic inception.”[3] Yet it is through this passage, from out of blissful narcissism, that we discover the other. We form connections, not simply warm support in an extension of the life in the womb, but the possibility of love and hate, life and death, self and other, through entry into language. Kristeva depicts this slightly hellish condition as precisely the place in which Christ meets us: “Christ abandoned, Christ in hell, is of course the sign that God shares the condition of the sinner. But He also tells the story of that necessary melancholy beyond which we humans may just possibly discover the other, now in the symbolic interlocutor rather than the nutritive breast.”[4] Language is for finding the other, for recognizing and negotiating mortality, and yet it can also be deployed as a refusal of this reality.

The matrix of language can be made to constitute its own reality, and can act as an obstacle rather than a bridge. In this understanding, attaching ourselves to the law, the immovable symbolic order, is simultaneously a means of inscribing ourselves into stone (becoming immortal) but the stone is an epitaph. Meaning attached to language per se, to the occurring of the sign, mistakes the letter of the law for its meaning. Kristeva raises the example of Chinese reification of the word: “In classical Chinese (for example, the I Ching), ‘to believe’ and ‘to be worthy of faith’ are expressed by the word xin, where the ideogram contains the signs for man and speech. Does ‘to believe’ therefore mean ‘to let speech act?’”[5] In the case of Japanese, being a speaker of the language conveys the spirit of Japanese identity. Much like the Jew, marked by Hebrew speaking and law-keeping, attachment to the sign conveys an immovable essence, which Paul characterizes as deadly. The reification of the word seems to be the universal tendency.

The philosopher often uses words much like the mathematician employs numbers, as a coherent symbol system which is or produces truth. In this understanding, language works within a closed system, in which words and symbols constitute their own reality. Thinking is being, as the thought contains the essence of reality. Rather than language leading from death to resurrection, we can be haunted by negativity, rejection, castration, death drive. In the language of the Apostle Paul, we can be caught between wanting and doing, between the law of the mind and the law of the body, and we can find ourselves overwhelmed with the ego, that ungraspable “I” in the mirror. The ego cogito is ever allusive, and yet pursuit of the ego poses as salvation.

To pass from death to resurrection requires a relinquishing of the ego. What Paul describes as kenotic self-giving love, is a relinquishment of stasis, being, and position, so as to reach out to and exist with and in the other. This kenotic lover does not insist upon his status or position in the symbolic order. This deadly attachment to law, is a futile attempt to have existence within the self – to establish the self-image as distinct from and not subject to the other. The ego is preserved at the cost of love. In the description of Graham Ward:

To be redemptive, to participate in the economy of redemption opened and perfected by Christ the form of God’s glory, our making cannot be in our name. Our making cannot, like the builders of the Tower of Babel, make a name for ourselves. Our making cannot reify our own autonomy. Such making is only death and idolatry. Our making must be in and through an abandonment to an operation that will instigate the crisis of our representations. Our making has to experience its Passion, its descent into the silent hiatus.[6]

The recognition of mortality, forsakenness, alienation, is the first step toward life. According to Kristeva, “It is because I am separate, forsaken, alone vis-àvis the other that I can psychologically cross the divide that is the condition of my existence and achieve not only ecstasy in completion (complétude: reunion with the father, himself a symbolic substitute for the mother) but also eternal life (resurrection) in the imagination.”[7] She is specifically thinking of life in Christ as completing the journey to love. ”For the Christian believer the completion of faith is real completion, and Christ, with whom the believer is exhorted to identify, expiates in human form the sin of all mankind before achieving glory in resurrection.”[8] The passage through death with Christ enables, through tarrying with the negative, kenotic love.

As Slavoj Žižek explains I Corinthians 13, this love necessitates self-emptying:

the point of the claim that even if I were to possess all knowledge, without love I would be nothing, is not simply that with love I am ‘something’ – in love, I am also nothing but, as it were, a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing paradoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack. Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimate mystery of love is therefore that incompleteness is in a way higher than completion. On the one hand, only an imperfect, lacking being loves: we love because we do not know all. On the other hand, even if we were to know everything, love would inexplicably still be higher than completed knowledge.[9]

Žižek’s negation rests upon an atheistic reading of Hegel, but the Christian Hegel sees negation, not as an end in itself, but as the merging of the infinite and finite. The infinite negates itself and so arises in the finite and the finite negates itself and this is realization of the infinite.[10] As Hegel states it, “Thus the life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as a disporting of Love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative.”[11] In Kenotic love God incorporates the finite. God in Christ emptied himself, not of deity, but of the presumption of infinity. “He existed in the form of God, [but] did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men” (Php. 2:5–7). Paul is recommending Christ as the model for the Christian, who obviously cannot empty themselves of deity, but they can “have this attitude” of self-sacrificial giving. They can “hold fast to the word of life” (Php. 2:16) in taking up this self-emptying Word.

Language is made for love, for connection to the other, such that all true dialogue is an act of love. Speaking as a reaching for the other is a relinquishment of the isolated ego. All true discourse is an act of love. According to Kristeva, “The speaking subject is a loving subject.”[12] But at the same time, “Love is a death sentence which causes me to be.”[13] As Ward explains, “All representation is a kenotic act of love towards the other; all representation involves transference – being caught up in the economy of giving signs.”[14] We gain access to both God and the neighbor through transferential (mutually indwelling) discourse of the kenotic Word. The task of theology, the work of the Christian, is to recognize how it is that the language of Christianity shapes us according to a different order of desire – (as Hans Frei describes) the unique “cultural linguistics of the Christian religion.”[15] In the vivid explanation of Ward:

As such, Christian theology is not secondary but participatory, a sacramental operation. It is a body of work at play within the language of the Christian community. Our physical bodies are mediated to us through our relation to other physical bodies and the mediation of those relationships through the body of the signs. Thus we are mapped onto a social and political body. The meaning of these signs is mediated to us through the body of Christ, eucharistic and ecclesial, so that we are incorporated into that spiritual body. Transcorporality is the hallmark of a theological anthropology. [16]

The deep grammar of the body of Christ inducts into an alternative linguistic community, in which lack and negation become the opening to love and entry into the corporate body of Christ, sharing a body, indwelling one another, through the “transcorporality” of Christ.

[1] Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Colum[1]bia University Press, 1988) pp. 40. Cited in Graham Ward, Christ and Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 207.

[2] According to Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, Translated by Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) xii.

[3] Kristeva, 41.

[4] Kristeva, 41.

[5] Kristeva, 35

[6] Ward, 215.

[7] Kristeve, 35.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute — Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London/New York, Verso 2000) 147. Cited in Ward, 264.

[10] This is the argument of William Goggin, Hegel’s Sacrificial Imagination, (University of Chicago, PhD. Thesis, 2019), 12.

[11] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 10.

[12] Kristeva, 170.

[13] Kristeva, 36, Cited in Ward, 212.

[14] Ward, 212.

[15] Types of Christian Theology (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 20. Cited in Ward, 217.

[16] Ward, 217-218.